Jones - intergenerational transmission

Intergenerational transmission is a very hot topic in epigenetics right now. Intergenerational transmission refers to this idea of prenatal programming.

So if you get exposed to something in utero, if your mother’s exposed to something or even it can be the sort of accumulation of her lifetime exposures; when a baby’s in utero, that baby’s exposed to that environment. It’s a sum of mom’s current exposures and past exposures. And the idea is that evolutionarily speaking, we want to be prepared for the world we’re going to be born into. So that’s the idea of prenatal programming.

So mom’s sets of exposures are supposed to inform how the baby is going to interact with the world. And so it becomes sort of biologically embedded in the baby to prepare that child for what they’re going to encounter.

And this alteration of risk idea becomes important when the environment that the baby is prenatally programmed to experience is not the same as what they actually experience. So that’s when we can get this alteration of risk and change to health outcomes is if what the baby is prenatally programmed to experience and what they actually experience sometimes don’t match up.